There are two forms of XP in War Dragons. One being XP earned by dragons to level up, and the other being player XP, which is required to rise in level to gain access to newer and more powerful stuff.

Dragon Experience

A players level determines the maximum number of experience points earned by a dragon. For example, at the lowly level of 1, a player can earn up to 102 experience for his dragons at a time. However, once you reach level 148, the cap for experience is a whopping 38,700!

Clearly, the best way to level dragons is to gain levels – attacking the easiest base possible that earns the dragon maximum XP for your level at the time. There are a number of bases that players use, known as training bases, that achieve this to great effect.

Joining a team with higher level players than you will help greatly. Having one player join to help, using just one dragon each will still give you maximum XP. It is normally considered polite to ask if you swap out a dragon at the start to reduce healing times.

Using multipliers is important. For your weak dragons, you are going to want to ask for help from your team so that you can maximize the x5, x4 and x3 multipliers. Once your multipliers have been used, a great way to gain quick XP for your weak dragons is to join as many of your team mates battles as possible and ask if you can kill the base at the end.

Player Experience

There are two ways to gain experience. The quick way, and the right way. See, lower level towers give more xp per time spent than higher level towers. But having a base full of weak towers (a long base) is significantly worse than a base full of strong towers (a short base).

Some might argue that base defence really doesn’t matter – since there are always dragons that can smash your base in one attack. At the end of the day, choose a strategy that you feel comfortable with and stick to it.

Using rubies for timers is essential when trying to level up fast, as is having a team that can help you with wood donations. If you have spare cash, sometimes it can be really worth it to buy 10 gold chests during events – but the special value packs often hold 17,500 rubies and 32x 12 hour timers, which is a lot of timers for towers!

UPDATE: Energy refills reset each skirmish, so the figures below are going to be way off!

If, like us, you’re wondering “Hey, just exactly what do I need to do to get maximum rewards?”, look no further!

Pocket Gems clearly have this overwhelming desire to cause sleepless nights for all of us, and if you ask us it’s just a touch unrealistic in our opinion to have such high demands on the players.

To reach the top tier of reward, you are basically looking at needing to use raids and because the leader has double points you are usually going to want to attack him to save on energy. This strategy may of course change depending on the points he gives! Sometimes it is far more beneficial to attack the highest level player in a team if he gives you more points.

We worked our spreadsheet a little harder this week, and although the exact chests per refill are not known to us we applied what we think is a reasonable expectation. Hey look, we even decided to try to catch 6 hours sleep in the process!

TL:DR; Basically you are going to need to attack targets giving you 185 points or more and raid them the maximum number of times. If you do this, expect to have to use almost 300 energy chests to get maximum points!

We don’t want to get all technical here, but really there are few worse sins than using your hard earned rubies for no reason.

Rubies for elite account

Controversial point: New accounts can’t buy elite account status, but by far the most effective use of rubies is to do just this. 7,900 rubies gets you elite account status for a whole year. Perfect. Now you get 75% extra XP and 35% more resources as well as being able to build two buildings at a time.

Rubies for wood/food

In all fairness, there are times where using rubies for resources makes sense. But really you want to be using this option as little as possible as it’s bloody well expensive. If it’s just a few gems, go for it. Especially if you have hundreds of thousands of resources and you’re under attack!

Rubies as speedups

You should never, ever use rubies to speed anything up directly. You are always by far better off going and spending those rubies on a speed boost pack at the forge for 1,750 gems and getting 10x 12 hour time boosts.

Rubies for tokens

If you’re fortunate enough to have an event with double tokens, then this is where you should be investing rubies. The main source of reward in this game is from solo rewards earned from events. Since the events rely on your power (and therefore dragons), having as many tokens available to breed the best possible dragons is a great course to choose.

Choosing the shortest mission timer will give you 1 token per ruby spent (regular) if you have an elite account and is far more ruby efficient than speeding up the hardest missions which give 0.2 tokens per ruby spent.

The balance

Obviously all of this is going to be down to personal taste. As you need higher levels to get access to more powerful dragon tiers, sometimes you are going to want to blow rubies on time boosts instead of gaining tokens.

Spending speed boosts

If we had it our way, nobody would spend speed boosts on anything other than buildings. Leveling dragons is slow, as is hatching them. The only time we recommend using speed boosts for hatching dragons is where you simply have to breed a dragon to gain access to another dragon during a breeding event.

Even that is tough though as higher tier dragons might not even get enough experience to breed before the end of an event.

It seems we are spending a bunch of time looking at the basics right now, and something that is totally overlooked by a lot of players is the simple matter of research.

With that in mind, we worked on a path that you can follow along with our recently published Breeding Guide, so that you can have an estimation of what your extra eggs might be best spent on.

Newest Dragons

Notes

Research Path

Eggs Used

Red Remaining

Purple Remaining

Blue Remaining

Orange Remaining

Green Remaining

Gold Remaining

Zin

*

Industrial Tools

1

1

Leviathan

Fortified Resource Structure

1

2

Aetrix

Economic Improvements

2

4

Hantu

Construction Efficiency

3

9

Merk

Organic Dragon Meat

1

15

Kastor, Trollis

Fiery Breath

2

17

1

Daemun, Kinnara

Dragon Discipline

5

12

3

Borg, Dactyl, Laekrian

Walled Foundations

1

19

Arborius

Enhanced Healing Mark

10

21

76

Gog, Klax, Kromon, Grypp

Heated Chamber

5

21

76

Baldr, Viscus, Drude

Poetic Alchemy

10

21

77

5

Alikorn

Healing Remedy

5

21

72

5

Huli

Enhanced Invincibility

10

21

62

5

Vladimir

Essence of Rage

60

21

2

5

Garuda, Jura

Create 24 Red Eggs

Hunter Violence

45

0

9

5

Volos

Create 6 Purple

Organic Dragon Meat

10

0

22

Yanari

Fiery Breath

3

0

0

19

Sahran

Healing Remedy

5

0

0

14

Ankor, Kobahl

Dragon Discipline

7

0

0

45

2

Slynx

Organic Dragon Meat

7

0

0

40

2

Bolt

Create 30 Blue

Essence of Rage

70

0

0

0

2

Etzel

Create 15 Purple

Economic Improvements

15

0

0

0

2

Vazir

Create 3 Blue

Fortified Resource Structure

3

0

0

0

2

Bronze

Offensive Tactics

3

0

0

68

27

Kelsis

Dragon Discipline

5

0

0

68

22

Habrok

Super Conductive Storm Cells

60

0

0

8

22

Lucius

Construction Efficiency

5

0

0

64

23

Gaspar, Luminark

Economic Improvements

7

0

0

57

36

Kolo

Poetic Alchemy

7

0

0

50

36

Ruma

Organic Dragon Meat

7

0

0

50

29

Hydron

Healing Remedy

7

0

0

50

22

Serabis

**

Red Magic Guard

25

0

0

25

36

Garzev

Blue Magic Guard

25

0

0

0

49

1

Enki

Battle Barricades

3

0

0

0

46

1

Noss

Sharpened Steel

5

0

0

0

41

1

Septys

Ammo Reserves

7

0

0

0

34

1

Ith, Ettin

***

Heated Chamber

3

0

0

0

12

19

Amarok

Economic Improvements

0

0

0

12

14

Nassus, Naga

Red Magic Syphon

35

0

0

0

242

14

Durga

Blue Magic Syphon

35

0

0

0

207

14

Pandi, Elixis, Basileus

Fiery Breath

3

0

0

0

207

36

Ferrox, Danzig, Urd

Organic Dragon Meat

5

0

0

0

207

45

Karna

Healing Remedy

7

0

0

0

207

38

Bander, Yersinu

Dragon Discipline

12

0

0

0

207

50

Munin

Galvanized Beams

7

0

0

0

200

50

Hugin

Sharpened Steel

3

0

0

0

200

47

Caladbolg, Whalegnawer, Consurgens

Ammo Reserves

5

0

0

0

200

79

4

Sekoronos, Khrysos, Nix

Recycled Shield Breakers

60

0

0

0

200

53

12

Firactus

Advanced Hunter Training

40

0

0

0

160

53

12

Chthoteutos

Essence of Rage

60

0

0

0

160

39

13

Lumen

Enhanced Lightning Resistance

20

0

0

0

160

19

13

Obviously this is not a hard and fast path to follow, as you will definitely have periods where you either spend a heap of time waiting for new eggs to arrive (feel free to fill in anything we missed), and you may also have a preference to a type of dragon or style of play.

There are a bunch of breeding guides out there, and this one is basically a replication of the guide by Abombs from the Tactical Breeding Guide.

This is one of our favourite versions so far as it gives you all the dragons for a total of 516,000 tokens. It also gives you:

47 red research eggs

109 purple research eggs

191 blue research eggs

336 orange research eggs

204 green research eggs

17 gold research eggs

Aiming For

Parent 1

Parent 2

Tokens Spent

Spare Red

Spare Purple

Spare Blue

Spare Orange

Spare Green

Spare Gold

Zin

Draco

Frigg

60

2

Leviathan

Frigg

Hext

60

2

Aetrix

Draco

Zin

100

4

Hantu

Leviathan

Aetrix

200

8

Merk

Zin

Aetrix

240

7

Kastor, Trollis

Merk

Frigg

200

4

1

Daemun, Kinnara

Merk

Trollis

200

2

Dactyl, Laekrian

Hantu

Kastor

240

8

Arborius, Borg

Laekrian

Daemun

2400

12

73

Gog, Klax, Kromon, Grypp

Arborius

Trollis

1000

5

Baldr, Viscus, Drude

Grypp

Kromon

3200

21

5

Alikorn

Leviathan

Viscus

40

Huli

Dactyl

Alikorn

40

Vladimir

Huli

Baldr

40

Garuda, Jura

Merk

Baldr

1000

7

Volos, Kobahl

Jura

Viscus

2400

17

Yanari

Volos

Vladimir

160

Sahran

Volos

Alikorn

160

Ankor

Volos

Sahran

5440

38

2

Slynx

Ankor

Baldr

300

2

Bolt

Slynx

Dactyl

180

Etzel

Slynx

Huli

240

Vazir

Slynx

Kinnara

120

Bronze

Baldr

Slynx

8000

68

28

Kelsis

Bronze

Draco

260

Habrok

Bronze

Drude

140

Lucius

Habrok

Etzel

8300

61

1

Gaspar, Luminark

Lucius

Bronze

8000

13

Kolo

Gaspar

Grypp

440

Ruma

Gaspar

Kelsis

440

Hydron*

Gaspar

Arborius

340

Garzev

Gaspar

Viscus

8000

13

1

Ith, Ettin

Garzev

Gaspar

27500

28

Amarok

Ith

Baldr

880

Durga*

Ettin

Luminark

1500

Enki

Bronze

Ettin

600

Noss**

Garzev

Baldr

900

Serabis

Gaspar

Luminark

7800

12

Septys

Garzev

Serabis

1460

Nassus, Naga

Slynx

Ruma

8000

267

Pandi, Elixis, Basileus

Nassus

Ettin

27500

25

Ferrox, Danzig, Urd

Pandi

Naga

27500

14

Karna

Pandi

Habrok

1800

Bander, Yersinu

Ettin

Danzig

48500

24

Munin

Bander

Septys

3100

Hugin

Bander

Kolo

2260

Caladbolg, Whalegnawer, Consurgens

Yersinu

Munin

100000

37

4

Sekoronos, Khrysos, Nix***

Ferrox

Basileus

100000

34

8

Firactus

Whalegnawer

Karna

3400

Chthoteutos

Serabis

Sekoronos

100000

46

1

Lumen

Whalegnawer

Ith

1820

* Breeding Hydron and Durga at these stages is purely about getting a Legendary dragon at a point where it is useful. You can save tokens if you can be patient to breed later on with other combos as a byproduct.

** Noss, Vazir, Bolt, Vladimir and to an extent, Hugin are all steps that can be skipped when you reach them with this guide as they will be superfluous.

*** The jewel in the crown is that this method allows you to get Khrysos very early on if you wish. However, our feeling is that the Consurgens/Whalegnawer combo is more desired.

Abombs has since contacted me with an updated version of his methods as follows:

I’ve spent a lot of time working on these numbers for the event, which show exactly what it takes for you to get to where you need to and the rewards you will get.

After listening to Pixxel on the live stream this morning, it seems clear that although the developers did state that obtaining Sobek would be possible for the casual player, they have changed their mind and it now requires a lot more dedication.

At lower levels, sorcerers can be deadly things. Their area effect spells and summon warrior abilities allow them to stay alive for a very long time.

Unfortunately, as towers become stronger and mage towers appear, using a sorcerer is an exercise in futility. Add a canny defender on top of this, and all of a sudden your dragon is next to worthless as the method of attacking means that concentrated fire is impossible to quickly reduce a tower to dust.

Having said that, one of the best things you can do once it becomes available is to buy Darja. This dragon is incredibly strong, offering not only protection in the form of a Summoned Warrior, but also Reverse Projectiles and Chain Lightning. Darja can easily last you into your sixties and is strong all the way through until then.

Warrior

The go to guy when things start getting serious. Warriors have the highest hitpoints of all dragons, and can focus their fire on one tower, making them perfect for attacking defended bases. Not only that, but they have many different dragons with the Explosive Shield spell which is an incredibly powerful spell.

Although Amarok is really strong, be wary of using all of your tokens to get him as soon as you see him. This can leave you with a long period of time with few strong dragons, and the token use to obtain him is much higher than a more economical method.

Hunter

Some of the very best dragons are hunters, and they are deadly when used right. Many people make the mistake of tapping just a single tower when attacking with a hunter, but the fact is that they utilise the multi-touch technology of the iphone quite comfortably. With a claw like shape, there’s nothing stopping you from taking out as many as five towers all at the same time (though most top players concentrate on just three).

Hunters are really economical users of rage for the most part, with Lockdown and Deathgaze taking just one rage per shot. With Healing Mark, dragons like Drude and Ettin can be back in action in no time if they are able to complete on full health. This makes them great for helping out the weaker players in your team.